Girl Gone Missing

by J M Gregson

  ‘We shall be seeing him, though. Just in case he can suggest any line of enquiry to us. Like you.’

  She nodded, but made no further comment on the boy friend. Lambert said, ‘I think you told us earlier that she was going out a lot more than she used to. Perhaps because she felt herself almost a woman, as you say. Have you any idea where she went on these occasions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or whom she met?’

  ‘No… She was a bit secretive about it, if you must know.’

  ‘I’m afraid we must, Kate, now that this is a murder enquiry. And I have to ask you the next question, too. Had your daughter ever had any involvement that you are aware of with illegal drugs?’

  ‘No. Well, she said a year or two ago that cannabis should be made legal, and we had a bit of an up-and-downer about it. But that’s normal for young people, isn’t it? I’m sure she never took anything. We’d have known about it if she had, I’m sure.’

  The two CID officers had heard such sentiments too often to set much store by them. Probably they meant no more than that the girl had not brought drugs into her home. But no doubt they would be clearer when they had spoken with her contemporaries. Ruth David said softly, ‘Do you have an up-to-date photograph of your daughter, Kate?’

  She nodded, then rummaged swiftly through her possessions in the shopping bag at her feet. The print was a seven inch by five inch enlargement of a snap. It was still in its frame, but the glass was cracked, making them wonder if it had been damaged in the clash between husband and wife that had sent Katherine Watts here. DS David, anxious to keep the level of emotion at a minimum, put it away with scarcely a glance. ‘Thank you. We’ll let you have it back in due course.’

  ‘It’s the last one,’ the mother said. ‘Robert took it in the back garden. It must have been about a month before — before she went.’

  Lambert could see the woman getting exhausted before his eyes. They could not press her much further. But there was one area they must explore, however briefly. He said, ‘What sort of relationship did Alison have with her stepfather, Kate?’

  She glanced up at him sharply, then knuckled her hands fiercely together over the tissues in her lap. ‘They loved each other, didn’t they? Don’t let anyone tell you any different from that.’ She paused for his challenge, but he said nothing, and after a moment she floundered on, repeating herself, becoming ever less coherent. ‘He adopted her properly, you know, when we got married eight years ago. They loved each other: of course, they had their rows with each other, but what teenage girl doesn’t fight with her dad? She used to come in late sometimes, and my Robert got upset with her, but that’s only what you’d have to expect. She gave us things to put up with, and no mistake, at times, did Allie. But nothing you wouldn’t expect, I suppose.’

  Ruth David looked at Lambert, received the tiniest of nods, and turned to look Kate Watts in the face from no more than four feet. ‘You’re in here because Robert knocked you about, aren’t you, Kate? We’re all agreed on that. We’re not here to follow that up, as Superintendent Lambert has told you, but I have to ask you this: did your husband ever strike Alison?’

  ‘No!’ It was almost a shout, lifting her off the old Windsor chair on which she had perched throughout. ‘No, you mustn’t think that. Well, he may have given her the odd slap on the leg years ago, when she was about eleven or twelve, but nothing more than that. You mustn’t think that Robert ever ill-treated my girl, you mustn’t. I told you, they loved each other!’

  In these days when the police unearthed more and more sexual abuse, it wasn’t the wisest phrase to keep repeating about a girl and her stepfather. But clearly Kate Watts thought that whatever her husband had done to her, he had had a normal relationship with her dead daughter.

  They left her then. She went with them to the door and took the arm of the younger woman as they turned to leave. she said, ‘Get them for me, won’t you? Whoever did this dreadful thing to Alison. Make sure you get them for me.’

  As they got into the car, they saw her strained, tear-stained face with its livid bruise staring down at them from an upper window, a reminder to them in the days to come of a mother’s cry for justice.

  Chapter Six

  LAMBERT dropped off at home for coffee, leaving Ruth David to go back to the station and feed their findings from the refuge into Rushton’s computer. Coffee at home was an indulgence only possible because his wife now worked part instead of full time at the primary school where she had taught for the last ten years.

  Christine knew that he had a murdered girl to investigate, a corpse too old to offer many forensic clues, a murder hunt that was severely handicapped from the outset by beginning twelve weeks after the event. At one time she would have known none of these things. John Lambert would have hugged these facts like the rest of the job close against him, excluding her from the horrors as well as the rewards of his work. Those days when they had almost split up seemed now to belong to another world.

  ‘How was it?’ she said as she set the steaming aromatic coffee in front of him. For she knew also that he had been to see the mother of the dead girl; knew how she herself would feel if one of her daughters had been killed at eighteen by person or persons unknown.

  He shrugged. ‘We got as far as we’d any right to expect, at this stage. Perhaps further,’ he said. ‘I still haven’t got a very clear picture of the dead girl, but I’m seeing some of her school friends in half an hour. That should help.’

  ‘I think I taught Alison Watts when she was nine years old,’ said Christine Lambert quietly.

  She had found a class photograph from the primary school, with a group of smiling children and a teacher standing at each end of the rows. Lambert saw his own wife ten years ago, still a bright, energetic woman with an alert, humorous smile and glossy hair. Now, nine short years later, she had lost a breast to a mastectomy and was beginning HRT to counteract the brittleness of ageing bones. Age crept up on you, overtook you whilst you were busy elsewhere. Before he knew it, he would be retired and tending the traditional policeman’s roses. He had better get Bert Hook to swallow the golfing bug quickly; but that might be a greater challenge even than solving this murder.

  Christine’s neat, clear-varnished nail ran along the row of young faces and stopped at one in the middle. ‘That’s her,’ she said.

  He saw a slightly bewildered, pig-tailed girl with a brace on her teeth and her arms not quite folded in time for the camera, which had clearly caught her by surprise. There was nothing to distinguish her from the other children in the picture, unless you looked with a parent’s biased eye. He pulled out the photograph that Kate Watts had given them, with its cheap frame and curiously pathetic cracked glass. The girl there was carefully made up, with fine brown hair which fell in shining natural waves over her temples. She wore a bright green silk blouse and was pretty, strikingly so, even with the end of a line of washing in the adjoining garden edging into the picture. There seemed no connection with the gauche little girl in the primary school group; this was a woman, conscious of the effect of her composed smile and her laughing, teasing eyes.

  Christine Lambert looked at the photograph for a moment without speaking. It was difficult to comprehend that this creature, so full of life, so fully into living, was now no more than the lump of rotting flesh which had been retrieved from the Wye. She had been wrong to think she understood how the mother felt: you couldn’t know what it was like to lose a child like that, she decided, unless it actually happened to you, however much you wanted to be sympathetic. It was one of those things so awful that even the most vivid imagination came nowhere near to experience.

  She said only, ‘You’d have been better off if she’d been ugly, John. A girl like that is going to have excited lots of men.’

  *

  Lambert took Hook with him to see the friends of Alison Watts. In his pre-CID days, Bert had gone into schools a lot, instructing young children in bicycle safety and older ones about the dangers
of the developing drug culture. Older children still remembered him unexpectedly, sometimes at awkward times.

  The two large men were followed by whisperings and curious looks as they went through the school playground and entered the sixth form complex. It had not taken long for news of the investigation to fly round the school community. Margaret Peplow met them as they stepped through the double glass doors. ‘I’ve put the girls in my office,’ she said. ‘It will be a bit of a squash in there, but you’ll have complete privacy.’

  Lambert had expected a mixed group, but apparently the group closest to the dead girl had all been girls. And it was a bit of a squash, as they had been warned. The room had been set up with seats for the two policemen behind the desk; a group of six stand chairs had been brought in and arranged in a tight semi-circle in the rest of the room. A hush fell as sharply as a guillotine upon the high-pitched exchanges as the two men were ushered into the room. Six pairs of eyes turned expectantly to meet them. There was a strong smell of cheap perfume as they picked their way to the chairs behind the desk. There was also an excitement in the crowded room that they could almost feel. A sense of importance, of being involved in a great local event. And a touch of apprehension, even outright fear of what was to come.

  ‘Most of you have probably already talked to a police officer when Alison Watts disappeared,’ said Lambert when he had introduced himself and Hook to the girls. ‘But this is altogether more serious. As I am sure Mrs Peplow has told you, we are now engaged upon a murder investigation. What we have to do is to build up a picture of a dead girl whom none of my team yet knows, but whom you all knew very well. We need your help. We need to know the kind of girl Alison Watts was, both in school and out of it. We need to know what her likes and dislikes were, how she behaved, how she thought, the people she knew. Even the people she didn’t know or hardly knew, if they had any sort of interest in her. I need hardly say that you mustn’t hold anything back, however trivial it may seem, however embarrassing it might appear for someone. No one who isn’t guilty of a crime is going to suffer from anything you tell us, and whatever you say now will be treated in confidence. I should like you also to maintain discretion about anything which passes between us, in here or elsewhere.’

  He had their attention. The room was so quiet that it was almost oppressive. He said, ‘We can start with some easy facts. Will someone tell me what subjects Alison was studying for her A levels?’

  The tension slackened. The girl nearest to him, tall and thin, with the horn-rimmed glasses which were now fashionable among the young, said, ‘That’s easy, at any rate. Alison was doing English, History and Sociology.’

  The girl next to her, anxious to get in now, said, ‘She started off last year doing English, History and French, but she dropped French after a few weeks because she found it hard going. She switched to Sociology because we all think it’s a bit of an easy option, you see!’

  There was a collective nervous giggle at this daring public voicing of a view they had agreed upon among themselves. Lambert smiled. ‘One of my own daughters decided that, in this very school. About eight years ago, now. It worked out all right for her.’

  The girl, thus emboldened, went on, ‘Allie wanted to read English at university. Or perhaps English and Drama, if she could get in at Bristol.’

  Hook wrote down the names of the teachers who were mainly responsible for teaching Alison in these subjects. It was all routine, factual stuff. It meant work, of course: a member of the CID team would have to see all of these people individually in due course, searching for the one suggestive fact that might provide a clue to the mystery of this intelligent girl’s death. But it was necessary information, and it got the girls talking, even anxious to contribute something which might draw them into the grisly glamour of a murder investigation. They wrote down other names: pupils who had had some sort of close connection but were not in this room. A girl with whom Alison had been on a brief holiday, two years earlier. A boy with a motorbike, who had taken Alison for spins out into the Cotswolds; he had left the school a year ago after his GCSEs but still kept in touch with her.

  They even managed a few collective giggles about life in the school, a few bold phrases about the deficiencies of the people who taught them. Then Lambert said, ‘Everyone has a life outside this place as well. Particularly you sixth formers. It’s right and proper that you should. We know that, and we want to know — need to know — everything about the life that Alison Watts had outside Oldford Comprehensive.’

  A sudden collective silence, such as there had been when they first came into the room. That was not a bad sign; it probably meant that there were useful things someone here could tell them.

  The girls shifted uneasily, wanting to look at each other, conscious that in this crowded, claustrophobic room they could not do so without giving things away. A girl at the end of the little half-circle of chairs, who had been happy to talk about Alison’s progress in her studies, looked quickly at her neighbour, a pretty dark-haired girl who had so far said less than anyone. It was enough to make Lambert chance his arm. He spoke directly to the dark-haired girl. ‘Allie went about with you quite a bit when you were away from the school, didn’t she? What kind of things did you do in your leisure time?’

  ‘Not a lot, in the last few months before she disappeared. We went to the discos in Oldford on Saturday nights sometimes, but other girls here went to those as well.’

  A girl at the other end of the line of chairs said, ‘Allie seemed to have given up going, though. She hadn’t been for over a year, I think.’ She looked along the line to the girl Lambert had first singled out. ‘You knew her best, Judith. Didn’t you go into Gloucester and Cheltenham with her sometimes?’

  ‘Not in the last few months I didn’t.’ It was a hasty denial. She looked back at Lambert and at Hook with his notebook and his busy ballpen. ‘Allie did go into Cheltenham and Gloucester, but not with me. Not in the months before she died.’ She was very insistent, seemed almost relieved to see Hook recording her statement.

  Lambert looked along the line of girls. ‘Does anyone know where she went to on these occasions?’

  There was a collective shaking of heads. A girl in the centre said, ‘We didn’t see as much of her in the summer term as we used to, I think.’ She looked round and the heads which had just shaken now nodded in unison. She hesitated, then said, ‘Allie was a bit older than most of us. A bit more sophisticated than me, certainly, if I’m honest. And she had more money than most of us.’

  The girls looked at the floor, but no one contradicted her. This was something none of the CID team had heard about the girl, so far, and it interested Hook in particular. The house in which he had talked to the girl’s stepfather had not seemed a rich one. And Bert would have bet the boots he no longer wore that Robert Watts did not earn a lot, and that most of what he had to spare passed across the counter of a bar or a betting shop. He said quietly, ‘And where did this money come from? Does anybody know?’

  They looked at each other again, each one seeming reluctant to speak. Eventually the girl who had voiced the thought said, ‘None of us knew that. We speculated about it a bit, among ourselves, when she appeared in clothes we’d have killed for, but she never gave us any hints.’

  There was a subdued, collective giggle; there was no humour in it, merely an involuntary nervous release. What had been no more than routine gossip in a tight community had acquired an extra significance with the death of the subject. Hook said, ‘Did Alison have a weekend job?’

  They looked again at the pretty, dark-haired girl, who blushed as she said, ‘No. We used to work together in the Budgens supermarket on Saturday mornings until about a year ago. I still do, but Allie gave that up about the time when we went into the sixth form.’

  ‘Yet you all think she had money from somewhere. You must have some idea where it came from.’

  There were muttered denials amidst a sporadic shaking of heads. An uneasiness hung now in the room,
but no one was willing to voice a thought about the source of the girl’s affluence. Hook eventually said, ‘Well, it’s something we shall need to find out about. If any one of you has a thought about it, please contact us immediately. We’ll give you a number when we leave here.’

  Lambert said, ‘You’ve had contacts with the drug culture, of course. All young people have. We’re not here today to talk about drugs, except as they may affect a murder investigation. What can you tell me about Alison Watts’s connections with drugs?’

  There was a long, uneasy silence. ‘Don’t trust the pigs’ was the watchword they had been given in the discos and pubs, and it was a slogan which sprang easily enough to their naive young lips. But these two earnest policeman were the reality, individuals rather than the collective filth their contemporaries went on about so glibly. And they were investigating the death of a girl who had sat with them for years as they moved up the classrooms of the school, who had laughed with them, schemed with them, shared their secrets. The girl with the horn-rimmed glasses took a deep breath and said, ‘Most of us have tried cannabis at one time or another. It was offered fairly openly around the school, about two years ago.’

  The girl next to her said hastily, ‘But it isn’t now. And most of us only tried pot once, or perhaps twice.’ Plainly she feared that this collective confession might be relayed to someone in authority, probably a parent.

  Lambert smiled; a grim, knowing smile. ‘Did Alison ever take anything stronger? Ecstasy, for instance?’

  If she had possessed drugs, she might have dealt in them, made her money from dealing. It would be her likeliest contact with the violence that always lurked around serious criminal money. But the dark-haired girl who seemed to have been closest to their murder victim said, ‘We never saw her with anything, did we, girls?’ and looked round to receive their nods of confirmation.